Project Background

Close following (driving too close to the vehicle in front) is a significant cause of road traffic accidents and accidents on all roads. Previous work carried out by TRL for the HA suggests that close following is very likely to contribute to five fatal road traffic accidents, 70 serious injury accidents, 1,000 slight injury accidents and 2,500 damage-only accidents on the HA network every year. These accidents cost £60M - £100M per year, which represents a significant cost to the UK economy. Accident data also suggest that close following accidents are more common in road works than on the road network generally. The reason for this is not clear but such accidents in a section of network with reduced...

Project Background

This is one of the projects included within portfolio MT7 – Effectiveness of Winter Maintenance Policy. The outcome sought for that portfolio is that roads are kept open and in a safe condition during winter, with minimal impact on the environment. The portfolio supports the vision of the Agency’s Sustainable Development Action Plan (SDAP) and the draft Winter Service Strategy.

This Project titled De-Icing Materials and Corrosion supports an objective of the draft Winter Service Strategy, which is being developed jointly by Network Operations (NO) and Network Services (NetServe) as part of their Winter Service Working Group mandate. That objective is no. 2.3 De-Icing Materials and...

Project Background

The Highways Agency Network Operational Policy (NOP) and National Health and Safety (NHS) Teams are seeking research and development support for a task that will evaluate the effectiveness of rapid deployment speed enforcement systems at short-term road works. The project will examine the effectiveness of such systems in reducing speed through road works through an on-road trial, determine what rapid deployment speed enforcement systems are available and will seek to quantify the likely benefits to road worker safety.This project will evaluate the viability of enforcement at short-term road works of the type typically carried out overnight, The project will examine the effectiveness of a rapidly deployable...

Project Background

The Highways Agency (HA) continually needs to make trade-offs between business objectives and risks, including safety, journey time reliability, sustainability and cost. Currently, these trade-offs are made on the basis of subjective judgement, or subject-specific criteria and approaches. This means that there may not be any underlying consistency or systematic basis for some of the techniques used, criteria taken into account, values or weights given to different criteria or to no-go tolerability criteria. This can result in inconsistent decision making and different levels of operational risk around the network.

Project Objectives

Project Background

The Government elected to implement a number of Managed Motorways schemes as alternatives to traditional widening. The HA therefore required a fuller understanding of the potential impacts of such a large and widespread introduction of such a relatively new technique. The backdrop against this work was set was ensuring the HA met its Public Service Agreement levels on Journey Time Reliability and that Stakeholders were brought along with the introduction of Managed Motorways.

Project Objectives

This task was to research three areas of Managed Motorways to ensure that our customers, stakeholders and motoring public obtained the maximum from our work in this...

Project Background

The Incident Management Policy Team is one of three teams making up the Network Policy Group within the Highways Agency's Network Services (NetServ) Directorate. The Group's mission is "to research, develop and deliver first class policy, advice and techniques to improve operational performance of the Strategic Road Network".

The Incident Management Policy Team is tasked with delivering a review of Police Vehicle Recovery Guidance and a scoping study into future Vehicle Recovery Policy in support of that objective. To co-ordinate work in this area the team wishes to appoint a Tech Con Framework Contractor to deliver the Projects within this single Task straddling 2008/09 and 2003/10 financial...

Project Background

1.1 The Incident Management Policy (IMP) team commissioned this work. IMP were asked to review the existing practice of double crewing Traffic Officer patrols and develop upon previous work to fully assess the feasibility of Single Crewed patrol units contributing to a Variably Crewed Traffic Officer Service.

1.2 Network Operations Central requested this work with the objective of optimising the use of existing traffic officer resource to potentially extend the service to cover critical sections of the All Purpose Trunk Road network.

1.3 The feasibility of Variable Crewing is proven in business terms by this study. However the practical feasibility assessment is not complete,...

Project Background

Traditionally, the Highways Agency and our contractors have built and maintained the motorways and the police have provided an operating role, primarily dealing with unplanned incidents like collisions. In 2003, a roles and responsibilities review made recommendations to transfer some of the police operational roles to the Highways Agency. Traffic Officers now cover all 2025 miles of motorway in England from seven regional control centres and 32 outstations. Our role is to help coordinate the resources of the other emergency services, manage traffic and reopen roads as soon as the police have finished their investigations. We continue to work closely with the police and other emergency services to minimise...

Project Background

Futher development of Single Crewing from Feasibility into testing stages.

Project Objectives

To progress Single Crewing from feasibility into testing.

Project Summary

The IMS team has been commissioned by the Traffic Management Division to
explore the feasibility of variable crewing and its impact within the Traffic
Officer Service. Currently the TOS provides two crew members in every patrol
vehicle. Variable Crewing would mean that either one or two crew members
would be in the vehicle, depending on need and prevailing conditions. At this
stage the brief was to undertake a Network...

Project Background

The HA’s IMP Team is undertaking a programme aimed at improving incident
management and associated policy. As part of this programme the HA
appointed Jacobs to develop previous work relating to variable crewing of the
TOS.
3.2 The previous work concerning TO variable crewing concluded that:
3.3 “A pre-requisite for the feasibility of variable crewing is that it is possible to
operate single-crew patrols safely on the network”
3.4 The HA therefore wish to determine if Traffic Officers can operate on the
network single crewed. This necessarily requires work to determine the
controls and risk mitigations that will facilitate lone TO activity,...